Eclogue

An eclogue is a poem in a classical style on a pastoral subject. Poems in the genre are sometimes also called bucolics. The form of the word eclogue in contemporary English developed from Middle English eclog, which came from Latin ecloga, which came from Greek eklogē (ἐκλογή) in the sense 'selection, literary product' (which was only one of the meanings it had in Greek). The term was applied metaphorically to short writings in any genre, including parts of a poetic sequence or poetry book. The ancients referred to individual pieces in Virgil's Bucolica as eclogae, and the term was used by later Latin poets to refer to their own pastoral poetry, often in imitation of Virgil. The combination of Virgil's influence and the persistence of pastoral poetry through the Renaissance imposed eclogues as the accepted term for the genre. Later Roman poets who wrote eclogues include Calpurnius and Nemesianus. In 1526, the Italian Renaissance poet Jacopo Sannazaro published his Eclogae Piscatoriae (Fishermen's eclogues), replacing the traditional Virgilian shepherds with fishermen from the Bay of Naples. He was imitated shortly after by the English poet Phineas Fletcher in his Spenserian Piscatorie Eclogs (1633), while in the following century William Diaper published Nereides: or Sea-Eclogues in 1712, in which the speakers are sea-gods and sea-nymphs. By the early 18th century, the pastoral genre was ripe for renewal and an element of parody began to be introduced. John Gay ridiculed the eclogues of Ambrose Philips in the six 'pastorals' of The Shepherd's Week. The impulse to renewal and parody also met in the various "town eclogues" published at this time, transferring their focus from the fields to city preoccupations. The first was a joint publication by Jonathan Swift and his friends in The Tatler for 1710; John Gay wrote three more, as well as The Espousal, "a sober eclogue between two of the people called Quakers"; and Mary Wortley Montagu began writing a further six Town Eclogues from 1715.